Summarizing Reports

Introduction

PerformYard Reports offer great flexibility to look at all your performance-related information in one unified report. These reports can include data from reviews, goals, surveys, and documents across the organization, as well as any employee-related fields. This data can then be sorted, filtered, and exported to your preferred spreadsheet for further analysis. Summary reporting offers the ability to perform additional analysis directly in the PerformYard application without exporting the data to a spreadsheet.

Summarizing a Report

The report builder offers a Summarize Rows panel, found below the Select Columns panel, to summarize the data contained in any report type. From this panel, you can select one or more fields to summarize the form data, toggle between detailed and summary views, and control additional options for the summary report.

There are two core concepts to a summary report:

Summarize-By Fields: representing the grouping of the data to be shown in a summary report
Summary Functions: define the aggregation that should be applied to the columns in the selected grouping

Summary reports allow for up to 4 levels of grouping or subgrouping across the supported summarize-by data fields. Some examples across the different report types include:

You might choose to summarize by Review Subject and calculate the average rating score across all forms received for each review subject to help identify employees that might be considered for promotion, for example.
You might choose to summarize a survey report by participant (a survey field), by manager (an employee field) and participant, by manager and participant and survey end date (another survey field), or potentially by manager and employee group (another employee field) and participant and survey end date.
You might choose to summarize a goal report by assignee (a goal field), or by manager (an employee field) and assignee, by manager and assignee and due date (another goal field), or potentially by manager and employee group (another employee field) and assignee and due date.

You can change the ordering of the summarize-by fields by dragging them up or down within the list of summarize-by fields. The table will automatically update itself to reflect the change. You can also easily remove or add additional Summarize-By Fields.

Summary Functions

You can summarize the answers to numeric questions (or other numeric fields) using common aggregations, for example, taking the average of the answers to a question across all forms for a subject or seeing the average rating given for a survey question across each group.

Review Reports: These summary functions summarize the results across all matching review forms. For example, if summarizing by the department only, then the summary will be the average of all the forms for employee review subjects from that department. If some employees in a department have more forms than others, then that department's average will be skewed toward the information contributed by those employees. You'll often want to include the Review Subject field as part of your Summarize-By fields to ensure a per-employee summary.

Toggling Detailed and Summary Views

You can easily switch between the summary view and detailed view by using the Summarize Rows toggle. The Summarize-By field selections will be remembered when you toggle to the detailed view.

Showing All Report Columns

All report types can include any number of fields, but not all columns are necessarily summarizable when switching to a summary view. Typically a summary report will be created to summarize numerical results, so columns reporting on open text answers don't make as much sense. Users can choose whether they want to show/hide such fields by switching the "Show All Columns" toggle in the summarize rows panel.

The report builder will attempt to keep any included text columns that show relevant information directly related to the summarize-by columns. For example, it will not hide employee fields when summarizing by review subject or not hide review cycle fields when summarizing by review cycle name.

Download to CSV

Reports of all types can be exported to CSV in either their detailed view or summary view for further analysis in your preferred spreadsheet or business intelligence tool. More information about exporting a report to CSV can be found in this article.

Examples

Scenario: Stack Ranking All Employees

A review cycle includes a form that captures an overall rating for an employee, and the company would like to see a summary for each employee that is the average across all forms for that employee. Additionally, to surface their top performers, the company would like to sort the report on the overall rating value in descending order to have top performers shown first in the table.

Summarize-By Field(s)	Review Subject
Summary Function	Average on an Overall Rating Question
Sort(s)	Descending on an Overall Rating Question

Suppose your company uses distinct review cycles and forms for each department. In that case, the question grouping functionality in reporting can be used to unify these questions from different forms into a singular question for summarization. You can learn more about question grouping in this article.

Scenario: Ranking a Manager's Employees

A company is interested in providing individual managers with the ranked results for their direct reports from the latest review cycle. In addition, the HR administrator wants to leverage this information to notice if specific teams appear to have significantly different approaches to scoring their team members by looking at the range of values team members on the managers' team received.

Summarize-By Field(s)	Employee Manager, Review Subject
Summary Function	Average on an Overall Rating Question
Sort(s)	Primary Sort: Ascending on the Manager column to list managers alphabetically Secondary Sort: Descending on the Overall Rating Question column to list the Managers' employees with the highest scores first.

You can sort multiple columns using the SHIFT key as you click individual columns.

Scenario: Reviewing Summarized 360 Feedback

A company leverages 360 feedback as part of its review process and would like to summarize the results of the various 360 forms into a single overall rating for each employee and get a general idea of the number of 360 forms submitted for each employee.

Filters	Review Cycle filter matching the review cycles to include in the report. Review Forms filter matching only 360 Form(s)
Summarize-By Field(s)	Review Subject
Summary Function	Average on the 360 Form Rating Question Count on a different question (to get the form count)
Sort(s)	Optionally, Descending on the 360 Form Rating Question

You can also add additional Summarize-By fields to organize the report by managers or by departments.

Additional Topics

Reference of Supported Summarize By Fields

You can find the current list of supported Summarize-By fields in the following article.

Reference of Supported Aggregation Functions

You can find the current list of supported aggregation and summary functions in the following article.